In general, a large amount of fabric such as sheets, cover fabrics, pillow cases, towels and the like are used in hotels, hospitals and the like, and the used fabric is collected and subjected to washing, ironing and folding at a laundry factory, and then carried back to hotels, hospitals and the like for use.
One type of linen equipment installed in a laundry factory is configured with a set including a charging machine, a roll ironer and a folding machine. In such linen equipment, a processing line is formed with these machines such that the charging side of the roll ironer is connected to the exit side of the charging machine, and the charging side of the folding machine is connected to the exit side of the roll ironer. When put in the charging machine, a fabric after washing is spread out into a slack-free and neatly-shaped state, ironed by the roll ironer, and folded by the folding machine.
Patent Document 1 discloses that types of fabric are identified on the basis of length information and thickness information on fabric and a folding machine classifies fabric by type. However, there is a problem that, since fabric is easy to stretch and shrink, when there are no larger dimensional differences among the types than the dimensional change caused due to the stretching and shrinking thereof, stable identification with high accuracy is not made. There is also a problem that the fabrics even to be delivered to different destinations, having approximately the same dimension, cannot be identified.